EagleHasLanded writes: Fifty years ago tomorrow, “38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens [NY] watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks.” That woman was Kitty Genovese, whose very name now conjures up an image of “urban indifference”—and whose story opened up three fields of psychology that barely existed beforehand: urban psychology, social psychology, and the study of prosocial behavior. Yet the case would have been a mere footnote to history, if not for a misleading and erroneous front-page story in The New York Times (quoted above), which suggested that dozens of people willfully ignored Genovese’s cries for help. The truth is something far more nuanced and complex, as author Kevin Cook argues in his recent book, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, and the Crime That Changed America.

swellconvivialguy writes: Fifty-five years ago today, nine young Russians died under suspicious circumstances during a winter hiking trip in the Ural mountains. Despite an exhaustive investigation and the recovery of the group’s journals and photographs, the deaths remained unexplained, blamed on “an unknown compelling force.” Now American film and television producer Donnie Eichar believes he has solved the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Working in conjunction with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, CO, Eichar developed a theory that the hikers died because they panicked in the face of infrasound produced by a Kármán vortex street.

EagleHasLanded writes: The U.S. Metric Association has been advocating for metrication since 1916 – without much success. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. government passed the Metric Conversion Act, but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone. Or could U.S. educators and health & safety advocates put this issue back on Congress’ radar screen?

EagleHasLanded writes: Lost in the discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power (“clean energy,” or a disaster waiting to happen?) are the impacts – both positive and negative – on the people and communities responsible for producing nuclear energy and the fuels it requires. In southwestern Colorado, a controversial proposal to build a new uranium processing mill, predictably, pits environmentalists against industry. Yet some find it strange that the towns in the surrounding area are strongly pro-mill, especially when one considers that lung cancer has taken the lives of countless local miners, and another uranium mining town in the same county, Uravan, Colorado, had to be completely buried in a Superfund cleanup. But those things get overlooked when people desperately need jobs.

No, not the first. And not the most interesting by any stretch. In 2011 CalTech's Div. III men's basketball team won its first conference game in 26 years(!) That was a great geek/sports story. And I think Slashdot missed the boat on it.

An anonymous reader writes: Timothy Paine, an entomologist at the University of California-Riverside, recently “committed to the scientific record the idea that California’s eucalyptus trees may have been biologically sabotaged, publishing an article [in the Journal of Economic Entomology] raising the possibility of bioterrorism.” Specifically, Paine argues that foreign insect pests have been deliberately introduced in the Golden State, in hopes of decimating the state’s population of eucalyptus (especially the two species regarded as invasive, which “are particularly susceptible to the pests.”) In California’s Bioterror Mystery, Paine (and scientists who are sceptical) make their arguments. What isn’t in dispute is that the insect pests have already inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, making the story a cautionary tale about what might happen if a food or crop were intentionally targeted.

An anonymous reader writes: Glock is synonymous with gun in the same way that “Google” is shorthand for Internet search. But unlike Sergey Brin and Larry Page few people know much about Gaston Glock, a reclusive Austrian who had no experience with guns when he designed his first pistol in the early 1980s. Glock did know a lot about injection-molded industrial plastic, though, and fashioned the frame of his pistols from polymer, making Glocks lighter and more durable than the steel and wood guns of competitors. And because Glocks could fire more rounds without reloading than traditional revolvers, American police departments – and then civilians – began clamoring for the Austrian guns. Ultimately, Gaston Glock became the late twentieth century’s Samuel Colt – “another handgun inventor who had a catchy one-syllable last name and knew how to market a weapon.”

wiredmikey writes: In its latest threat report released on Monday, Symantec revealed that while the number of vulnerabilities fell by 20% in 2011, the number of malicious attacks jumped by 81% and the number of Web-based attacks that the company blocked jumped by 36%. Moreover, the number of unique malware variants surpassed 400 million.

Another interesting takeaway from the report is the fact that targeted attacks are growing. Symantec notes that the number of daily targeted attacks increased from 77 per day to 82 per day by the end of 2011. More than 50 percent of such attacks target organizations with fewer than 2,500 employees, and almost 18 percent target companies with fewer than 250 employees. When it comes to the actual targets, 58 percent of attacks focused on employees in roles such as human resources, public relations, and sales.

An anonymous reader writes: Women tend to find it harder to quit smoking than men, and a new study suggests why — women's brains respond differently to nicotine, the researchers say. When a person smokes, the number of nicotine receptors in the brain — which bind to nicotine and reinforce the habit of smoking — are thought to increase in number. The study found in men, this is true — male smokers had a greater number of nicotine receptors compared to male nonsmokers. But surprisingly, women smokers had about the same number of nicotine receptors as nonsmokers. "When you look at it by gender, you see this big difference," said study researcher Kelly Cosgrove, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine.

An anonymous reader writes: The news may not have seeped into the public consciousness, but recent research suggests that HIV made the leap from chimpanzees to humans sometime between 1884 and 1924, though conditions weren’t ripe for AIDS to spread widely until decades later. The history of HIV — and how African efforts to combat the epidemic have sometimes been more effective than the efforts of the West — are discussed in a revealing new book called Tinderbox, co-written by the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg and noted epidemiologist/medical anthropologist Daniel Halperin. Timberg places a lot of emphasis on the role of male circumcision in limiting the spread of HIV, noting in this interview that “men who have foreskins are 70-75 percent more likely to get HIV.”

An anonymous reader writes: “Some people remember Sealab as being a classified program, but it was trying not to be,” says Ben Hellwarth, author of the new book Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, which aims to “bring some long overdue attention to the marine version of the space program.” In the 1960s, the media largely ignored the efforts of America’s aquanauts, who revolutionized deep-sea diving and paved the way for the underwater construction work being done today on offshore oil platforms. It didn’t help that the public didn’t understand the challenges of saturation diving; in this comical exchange a telephone operator initially refuses to connect a call between President Johnson and Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, (who sounded like a cartoon character, thanks to the helium atmosphere in his pressurized living quarters). But in spite of being remembered as a failure, the final incarnation of Sealab did provide cover for a very successful Cold War spy program.

EagleHasLanded writes: The Berkeley Pit, an abandoned open pit copper mine in Butte, Montana—part of the largest Superfund site in the U.S.—is filled with 40 billion gallons of acidic, metal-contaminated water. For years the water was believed to be too toxic to support life, until Andrea and Donald Stierle, a pair of organic chemists at the Univ. of Montana discovered that the Pit is a rich source of unusual extremophiles, “many of which have shown great promise as producers of potential anti-cancer agents and anti-inflammatories.” In the course of their ongoing investigation, the two self-described “bioprospectors” have also discovered an uncommon yeast, which might play a significant role in cleaning up the site. In the meantime, the Pit has become a tourist attraction in Butte, which charges $2 for the opportunity to take in the view from the Viewing Stand.

Submitted
by
swellconvivialguy
on Saturday September 24, 2011 @07:53PM

swellconvivialguy writes: Earlier this year Maersk ordered 20 super-size container ships—each to have “16 percent larger capacity than today’s largest container vessel, Emma Maersk.” But instead of embracing the bigger/more-is-better mentality, Staxxon, a NJ-based startup, has engineered a folding steel container (it folds like a toddler’s playpen), which is designed to make shipping more efficient by “reducing the number of container ship movements.” No one has yet succeeded in the marketplace with a collapsible container, but Staxxon has made a point of learning from the mistakes of others.

An anonymous reader writes: For those opposed to natural gas drilling in the United States, fracking is a dirty word. But the public needs to have a serious discussion about whether the costs and risks (like methane contamination) outweigh the considerable benefit of reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil and turning the US into an energy exporter. In “The End of Country” Seamus McGraw aims to jump start the debate by examining the issues at ground level, describing what happens when Big Energy comes to small town USA.

swellconvivialguy writes: Looking at a picture of the world’s largest container ship it’s easy to visualize how 10,000 containers fall overboard from these vessels every year. Now scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are undertaking the Lost Container Cruise, an attempt to gauge the effects of shipping containers lost at sea by studying a tire-filled container, which marine biologists discovered in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. ( The research is being funded by a multi-million dollar settlement with the operators of the Med Taipei, the ship that lost the cargo.) The work is not unlike studying a deep water shipwreck: Use robotic submarine to take pictures and collect sediment samples; repeat.